Takeoff! (12 page)

His lordship blinked thoughtfully. “Odd, yes,” he said after a moment, “but hardly world-shattering. I scarcely see how it concerns us.”

Lady Curvert tapped the paper. “Venusians.”

Lord Curvert elevated an eyebrow a fraction of a millimeter. “My dear old girl,” he said in a voice tinged with sarcasm, “the last time I was on Venus, back in 1948, nothing on that vast overheated Turkish bath had evolved any higher than the sponges. I hardly think that the succeeding fifteen years could have produced the intelligence required to beat out a hot rhythm on a set of bongo drums in a beatnik coffee house-though that is admittedly not such a tremendous leap in intelligence.”

“I’m quite aware of that, Charles,” his wife said coolly. “It’s merely that this article has apparently started an intuitive chainweb in my mind. Something will come of it, I’m sure.”

“Ah, I see.” Lord Curvert was well aware of his wife’s mental abilities. “Very well, my dear; when you’ve formed a full intuition, let me know. Meantime, I’ll have some more kippers.”

Lord Curvert finished the kippers, the
Times,
and the coffee, excused himself, and headed toward the library, leaving his wife to continue her reading. She had already finished the American papers and had begun on
Pravda.
Within an hour, she would have all the salient points of the day’s news filed away in her capacious and accurate memory, where her subconscious could get at them in its ceaseless work of forming the “hunches” that made Evelyn Curvert so useful in her position as Assistant to the Galactic Observer.

Fesswick, the butler—tall, broad shouldered, a pluperfectly correct expression on his very human-looking face—was waiting for his lordship in the library.

“Good morning, Fesswick. Anything interesting this morning?”

“Very little, my lord,” said Fesswick in his precise voice. “The instrument readings are normal. The Russians attempted to launch another of their new rockets at 0517 this morning. It exploded at 0521.”

“They won’t publish this failure, either,” said Lord Curvert.

“Very likely not, my lord,” said Fesswick. “According to the neutrino emission detectors, the new reactor at Tel-Aviv suffered a slight misfunction at 1143 last night. Nothing serious, but it was damped at 1144 and has remained so.”

“Down for repairs, eh?” his lordship commented.

“Precisely so, my lord. Solar emission,” Fesswick continued, “remains normal. The...”

Fesswick took nearly seven minutes more to deliver his report of the happenings of the past twenty-four hours as they had been recorded on the special instruments concealed within the depths of Castle Curvert. They had been reporting their data precisely since they had been built into the castle, six hundred years before, and they would go on doing so until they were shut off-or destroyed.

All in all, everything was quite normal.

Lord Curvert sat down behind his desk and sighed gently. “Rather dull, isn’t it, Fesswick? I mean, we haven’t had any real excitement since that squadron of Mizarian ships got off course and tried to land, back in ‘47.” He gazed reminiscently at the ceiling. “Had the devil’s own time with them for a while, there.”

“A masterful piece of work on your part, if I may say so.”

“Thank you,” his lordship said absently. “Fesswick, has it occurred to you that our work may soon be completed on this planet?”

“The thought has crossed my mind, my lord.”

“They’ve come up fast, Fesswick. In another half century, they may be ready to go to the stars, and a hidden Observer will no longer be necessary. Still, it’s been interesting, hasn’t it?”

“Very interesting, my lord.”

There was a note in Fesswick’s voice that made Lord Curvert look curiously at his butler. He had always regarded Fesswick as—well, as part of the machinery. He was simply
there.
He had
always
been there. To imagine Castle Curvert without Fesswick was to imagine Egypt without the pyramids. And yet

“You’ve been with the family for a long time, haven’t you, Fesswick?”

Instead of answering immediately, Fesswick turned to look at the shield on the wall, upon which was emblazoned the Curvert arms—
Vert,
on a
pale
or, a heart of the
field.

There was pride in Fesswick’s voice when he spoke. “In a sense, my lord, I have only been with the family four generations. I was sent in as a new model to replace my predecessor in the year 1155, shortly after your great-grandfather was created the first Baron du Coeur Vert by Henry II for his services following the overthrow of the unhappy usurper, Stephen. Those were exciting times, my lord.” He turned to face his master again.

“In another sense, my lord,” he went on, “I have been with the family much longer. Since all the pertinent memories were transferred from the brain of my predecessor to my own, I have a sense of continuity that goes back to the establishment of the Observership, more than eight thousand years ago.”

Lord Curvert, who had scarcely entered his twelfth decade, felt suddenly humble before the majesty of eighty centuries of time.

There was a rap at the door. “Charles!” The door opened before either Fesswick or Lord Curvert could answer, and Lady Curvert swept in. “ Ah, there you are. Good morning, Fesswick. Charles, I have arrived at a full intuition. The Thregonnese. We should investigate at once.”

“The metamorphs of Thregonn? Good heavens, you don’t say so”‘ Lord Curvert stood up from his chair. “But how could they have come here?”

Lady Curvert shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

His lordship looked at Fesswick. “How about that, Fesswick, old man? Could a spaceship have landed recently without registering on the detectors?”

“Highly unlikely, my lord.”

Lord Curvert looked back at his wife. “Fesswick says it’s highly unlikely, my dear.”

“My intuition is never wrong, Charles, “ Lady Curvert replied with dignity.

“That’s true, eh, Fesswick?”

“Quite true, my lord. Her ladyship has never been known to err in matters of intuition.”

“Very well, then; given the datum that there are Thregonnese on the planet, the question is: how did they get here? That seems to me to be logically deducible, which puts it in your department.”

“I shall endeavor to give satisfaction, my lord.” His high speed robotic brain was capable of working such problems in minute fractions of a second, so he continued without a pause: “It is obvious, my lord, that, in order to get from Thregonn, the metamorphs must have come by interstellar vessel. The only way such a vessel could have entered the Solar System without registering on the detectors would be to utilize a screen that would prevent the telltale wake from the drive energies from reaching us.”

“But there is no such screen, Fesswick,” Lady Curvert objected.

“With all due apologies, my lady,” said Fesswick, “there is such a screen. The Sun itself. Interstellar drive energies cannot penetrate through the core of a star without absorption.”

“Then their ship must have entered the Solar System by coming in from the opposite side of the Sun from Earth?” Lady Curvert said.

“Precisely so, my lady .”

“But look here, Fesswick,” said his lordship, “that’s all very well for getting them into the Solar System, but it doesn’t answer at all for getting them to Earth itself. So far, you’ve gotten them a hundred million miles from Earth, with the Sun between us. The question is: How did they get
here?”

“The
Viper
, my lord,” said Fesswick imperturbably.

“The
Viper
?”

“Exactly, my lord. The Venus Interplanetary Probe ElectroRocket. It was, if you will recall, an unmanned automatic probe rocket designed to make an orbit close to Venus, take photographs, and return to Earth-an orbit which necessitated its being, for a time, on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth.”

“Oh, yes. I remember seeing the photographs in the Times. Quite good ones they were, too,” Lord Curvert said musingly. “Then, while the
Viper
was on the other side of the Sun, the Thregonnese simply attached a capsule to the side of it and rode it back to Earth.”

“Exactly, my lord. It could have been done in no other way.”

“The timing is exactly right, too,” said Lord Curvert thoughtfully. “Naturally, we had no reason to suspect anything at the time; it was simply another American rocket returning home. It landed in the Pacific, as I recall, and the American Navy didn’t find it for nearly an hour-plenty of time for the Thregonnese to detach their capsule and be on their way. Probably used a distorter to foul up the Navy’s radar a bit, so that it would take more time to find the
Viper.

“Without doubt, my lord,” Fesswick agreed.

“Very ingenious of them,” said his lordship. “Very. But you see what this implies, don’t you? They have been on Earth for nearly a year—for what purpose we have, as yet, no notion. And now, suddenly, they advertise their presence almost blatantly.

“Their very method of entry shows that they are aware of the presence of a Galactic Observer on this planet, so one would think that they would do their best to remain in concealment.”

“Do you fear a trap, Charles?” Lady Curvert asked calmly.

“Let us say that, at the very least, they are attempting to draw the attention of the Galactic Observer, and that they have succeeded. Why? They want to find out who the Galactic Observer is; they want to be able to put their finger on me, as it were.

“On the other hand, this is almost
too
blatant to be. a trap. They not only advertise their presence, but practically tell me how they got here. It’s almost as if they wanted me to recognize it as a trap. Still, that seems a little too much, doesn’t it? We don’t have all the data as yet, and, as a chap I used to know once remarked, ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.’”

“Shall I begin preparations, my lord?” asked Fesswick.

“Immediately. That’s where they’ve baited their hook very nicely, you see; we have no choice but to investigate. However, we shall take every precaution.” He frowned suddenly. “By the by, Fesswick, I am scheduled to address the House of Lords tomorrow. We’ll have to send a proxy. Fortunately, I’ve already written the speech.”

“Shall I attend to it personally, my lord?”

“By no means! I want you here-at the controls.”

“Certainly, my lord. I’ll send Elsie, the upstairs maid; she should be able to carry out the deception competently.”

“Quite. Now, let’s get with it, Fesswick. The game, as my friend used to remark, is afoot.”

During the reign of Queen Victoria, when the British Empire was at its peak, Lord Curvert had had the opportunity of chuckling inwardly-though deploring outwardly-when he was told of the horrible fate that might face an Englishman stationed in some far-off place. Accompanied by a sad shake of the head, the story usually went something like this: “Terrible thing about Lord Greystoke. Hadn’t you heard? Greystoke’s gone native. Africa, you know. Deplorable. Doesn’t even dress for dinner any more, so I hear.”

What caused Lord Curvert’s inward mirth was, of course, that the first thing a Galactic Observer did when stationed on a planet was to “go native.” One not only had to blend in, one had to change with the times. One had to age one’s appearance slowly and bring up “children”—parts played by one or more of the robots—and then, at the right time, one became one’s own son while a robot played the older man and finally “died.” Such things required a chameleon-like ability to adapt, to change one’s personality as one might change one’s hat.

Thus it is not to be considered remarkable that Ben and Cordelia Holler, who stepped out of a dark alley near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, bore no resemblance whatever to Lord and Lady Curvert, either in appearance or manner.

“Do we make the scene here for a bit,” Cordelia asked, “or do we cut out for New York soonest?”

“We cut out for N.Y., chick,” Ben said. “Those squares might have pegged us if we’d used a teleporter into the Village, but they won’t dig the G.O. making it on a jet plane. Let’s get this wild gig going, chicky.”

They walked out into the fog-filled light that spilled from the street lamps.

Ben chuckled. “Let’s grab a cab. I mean, like we got bread to blow, so let’s blow it.”

She grinned up at him. “Crazy, man! I mean,
real
crazy!”

A few hours later, they were in Manhattan. The roundabout method of arrival had been absolutely necessary. If Fesswick, at the controls of the teleportation projector, had put them directly in New York, there was a slight chance that the Thregonnese detectors might have registered the activity of the materialization field. On the other hand, it was necessary to get into the United States without going through the formality of passing through Immigration and Customs.

“First thing, baby,” Ben said as they came out of the subway exit at Waverly Place, “is to tag us a pad. Dig? Then we make the scene at the Kettle and a couple of the other cool spots for kicks.”

Ben and Cordelia made the scene in the Village for seven days before they went anywhere near the Venus Club. They didn’t want to seem anxious, so they played it cool. They strolled into the Venus Club late one Friday evening, and the joint was really swinging. The kookiest-looking quartet this side of an H-kick nightmare were blowing out a beat crazy enough to make any cat flip his gasket.

Ben and Cordelia sat down, ordered a couple espressos, and kept playing it cool, just digging the whole bit.

The four musicians were hot; there was no question of that. And cool at the same time. But both Ben and Cordelia could tell at a glance that they were not-definitely not-human beings dressed up in fancy suits. They varied in color from pale pink to deep purple-a drummer, a trumpeter, a clarinetist, and a bass viol player. The lips of the trumpeter and the’ clarinetist formed the instruments they played. The bass player’s belly formed the sounding box of his instrument, with the strings running from his nose to a point below where his navel should have been. The drummer’s belly ballooned out like a kettledrum, with a flat drumhead just below his sternum.